Sunday, September 26, 2004

Big Time

Tom the Bomb--
to see him in live action is to have my admiration redoubled. His genius is in embodying roles no one else will touch, slices of the great big world that are normally dismissed, the unromantic loser, the drunk, the bum (the real one, stinking and crazed and drunk, no romantic hobo vision here), and embodying them so fully, so passionately, that they become tragic (at least tragi-comic) and beautiful at once--
to watch him singing, doing dark violence to his vocal chords, lost in character, it is to realize what an artist he is, Artist in the big grand sense of one who lives for art and is lost in it and is bigger than any single genre.
Of course, he also seems to be insane, as he put it in an interview, a rat gnawing at anything to keep his teeth worn down, to keep them from growing on up through the roof of his mouth and through his brain.

A movie that can start with "Frank's Wild Years" and get weirder and darker from there, well, that is an accomplishment!


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